The present invention relates to a document filing system which stores electrical signals representing picture information such as documents and, when desired, retrieves desired picture information to display and/or print the same.
A filing system for recording original document information on a microfilm in a size-reduction manner widely used for storing an enormous amount of the document information produced in companies and offices to provide space-saving and easy retrieval manner. The microfilm filing system has succeeded in greatly saving the space for keeping the document information, but has a problem in providing quick and effectively retrieving and sampling of desired information from the mass of information stored on microfilm.
An electronic document information filing system has been developed, superseding the microfilm filing system. The filing system two-dimensionally laser beam scans an original document to be filed, forms electrical image signals representing the scanned document contents by means of, for example, a charge coupled device (CCD), and records the image signals into a recording medium with a high recording density. In this type of the filing system, filing information corresponding to every picture information, called "title information" are stored. The title information includes index information representing locations on a recording medium where the picture information are stored and further retrieval codes generally representing the picture information. When a desired retrieval code is keyed in from an input section including a keyboard, the document picture information correspoding the title information containing the retrieval code are retrieved and extracted, and finally are displayed on a display device. When the document contents extracted is desired to be printed, a corresponding key is depressed to print out the document contents extracted in the form of a called hard copy.
The known filing system, however, needs two display devices for displaying the title information and the picture information corresponding to the title information; a first display device exclusively used for displaying the title information and a second display device for exclusively displaying the picture information. This results in a complicated construction and an increased manufacturing cost.